At around 11:30 am on July 1, 2014, a scientist from the Food and Drug Administration went inside Room 3C16, a cold-storage area at the National Institutes of Health Labs in Bethesda, Maryland.
The FDA had been using the space since the early 1990s to store samples for biological research but had been cleaning it out in preparation for a move to a nearby campus in Silver Spring.
The scientist who entered saw 12 mysterious cardboard boxes on a crowded shelf in the far left corner of the storage space and pried one open to see what it contained. Inside, dozens of long vials were packed in rolls of white cotton and sealed with melted glass; many of the labels were worn to the point of illegibility. The scientist noticed one vessel that held some loose, freeze-dried material. Its label bore a single decipherable word: “variola,” another word for smallpox—a disease that the 19th-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay deemed “the most terrible of all the ministers of death.”
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